Money Talks: How to Save a Doomed Economy
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you save a region from an economic tailspin? For this Money Talks, Felix Salmon chats with Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and, most recently, Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places. They discuss the economic and political forces that drag countries and regions to the bottom — and how they might be saved. Paul gives examples across time and geography, from Cold War-era Germany to modern-day Africa.
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Podcast production by Jared Downing and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to money talks from Slate Money. |
| 0:16.9 | I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. |
| 0:18.6 | This is Money Talks where we talk to very interesting and fabulous people about big, |
| 0:23.3 | wonderful, interesting ideas. And this week, we have Paul Collier. Paul, welcome. Thanks very much for |
| 0:31.5 | inviting me. So introduce yourself, Paul. Who are you? Oh, dear, I'm a professor. That's always a book. I write books that people read. |
| 0:40.7 | I wrote the bottom billion, which has been read by many millions of people. And more recently, |
| 0:45.8 | I wrote the future of capitalism. And now, Left Behind. Left Behind is an economics book, |
| 0:52.4 | which is endorsed by some of the fanciest economists in the world. |
| 0:57.0 | Do Nobel Prize winners is subtitled, a new economics, the neglected places. |
| 1:02.9 | So, Paul, we are going to talk about all manner of different regions. |
| 1:06.7 | We're going to talk about the Basque region in Spain, about South Yorkshire and England, about the Midwest in the United States, but also about various countries in sub-Saharan Africa. |
| 1:16.2 | We have a lot of different areas that may have been left behind, and we're going to try and work out what causes them to spiral down and more importantly, what might cause them to spiral back up again. That is all coming up |
| 1:29.8 | on money talks. So left behind is just this incredibly interesting concept which which even just reading the title, once you |
| 1:46.9 | understand what it's referring to, changes the way that you think about the world. And that's |
| 1:52.5 | really why I wanted to get you on this show, because I'm someone who has been thinking about, I guess, |
| 2:00.4 | the sort of Richard Florida idea of the world |
| 2:02.7 | being spiky. You have the world with a lot of people distributed across it. And then there's |
| 2:08.1 | a relatively small number of very rich and vibrant economic powerhouses, New York, Paris, L.A., Beijing, you name them, we can all name them. |
| 2:20.8 | And there's a sort of spikiness to the world where all of the interesting things, most of the |
| 2:25.7 | economic activity is happening in a relatively small number of places. And what you do in this |
| 2:30.9 | book is you kind of turn that upside down. And instead, you say, well, |
| 2:34.4 | don't think of the world as being spiky. Think of the world as having like these depressions |
... |
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